Template:Steward elections guidelines
Candidates
Prerequisites
Before applying for stewardship, you must:
- agree to abide by the policies governing steward access, checkuser access, oversight access, and privacy;
- be eligible to vote as outlined below;
- hold or have held administrator rights on at least one public Wikimedia Foundation project for a period of at least three months.
(You can [{{{candidate-check-tool}}} check the above requirements automatically].)
Also, because steward work can lead to legal consequences and involvement (see the checkuser and oversight policies), you must:
- be at least 18 years old, and at least the age of majority in your country, before February 1st;
- sign the confidentiality agreement.
Stewards are preferably multilingual, because steward work often involves projects of varying language, but this is not a requirement. They should also be available on a reasonably common basis. The stewards policy sets limitations; for example, stewards may not use their access on projects that they are active on to avoid conflicts of interest, and are encouraged to watch and help on the steward request pages. They can also join the IRC channel #wikimedia-stewardsconnect on Libera Chat to answer requests.
Inactive stewards will have their access removed.
Application
If you want to submit yourself as a candidate, please follow these steps.
Candidate submissions begin on 15 January {{{year}}}, 00:00 (UTC) and end on 30 January {{{year}}}, 23:59 (UTC)
Create your statement and vote page
- Create a subpage (enter your username in the box, open it and click Publish page)
- Edit the page with the following information:
- a link to your user account on Meta, and a link to a second active account that meets the prerequisites.
- a list of languages you can read and write, using the language-independent Wikimedia shorthand like "en-3", "es-3" or "es-2" (see user language).
- a short summary of your participation in the Wikimedia projects. Of particular interest are administrator or bureaucrat access, volunteer work such as membership of the email response team or an Arbitration Committee, or any other information you feel is relevant. You can read other applicants' statements for more ideas.
- Now create your votes page (no need to do any modifications; just publish the page):
- When you are done with that, add yourself in alphabetical order to the [[Stewards/Elections {{{year}}}/Statements|statements index page]] (with
{{/YOUR USER NAME}}), add a section to the [[Stewards/Elections {{{year}}}/Questions|Questions page]] and list your subpage on the [[Stewards/Elections {{{year}}}#Index|elections page]] by adding the following text: "{{Se candidate indexer|{{{year}}}|YOUR USER NAME}}". Volunteers will add translations in various languages to it for you.
Sign the confidentiality agreement
 | You must sign the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information before February 1st, or you will be disqualified. Please see the instructions for the process for doing this. |
Voters
Before you vote, you must:
- have an account;
- not primarily use the account for automated (bot) tasks;
- have made at least 600 edits globally (on all Wikimedia wikis) before 01 November {{{previousyear}}};
- have made at least 50 edits globally (on all Wikimedia wikis) between 01 August {{{previousyear}}} and 31 January {{{year}}}.
(You can [{{{voter-check-tool}}} check the above requirements automatically].)
You can vote "yes", "no" or "neutral" once per candidate. If you need to change your vote after, you are permitted to do so.
To vote, view the vote page of the candidate, through either clicking the link from their statement page or clicking any of the yes/no/neutral options from the main [[Stewards/Elections {{{year}}}|hub page]]. From there, right below the candidate statement is a "vote" button - press it, select your vote, enter an optional rationale and submit your vote. Your vote will be added right away, and your eligibility will be checked after.
Any user is also free to comment on the concurrently-running steward confirmations at [[Stewards/Confirm/{{{year}}}]].
Translators
Please see the [[Stewards/Elections {{{year}}}/Coordination|steward election coordination portal]] for details.
Suggestions to participants
- You can ask the candidates questions on [[Stewards/Elections {{{year}}}/Questions]]. Please post no more than 2 relevant questions per candidate (including those for all candidates), and keep them as short as possible.
- You can add a short (at most one or two lines) statement explaining your vote. Long conversations (responses to the votes of others) may be moved to the talk page, with a note added so other participants know where to look for it.
- As some users have disabled CentralNotice, you may also inform other users who might be interested in participating in the voting.
For Stewards/Elections 2020/Guidelines etc.
Parameters: the default dates are fitting for February elections
- year = the year of the election
- previousyear = the year before the election
- voters-edits = no. of edits users must have made for being able to vote (default 600)
- voters-edits-before = the edits must have been made before this date (default: 1 November of the previous year)
- voters-recent-edits = no. of edits users must have made recently for being able to vote (default 50)
- voters-recent-edits-start / voters-recent-edits-end = timeframe for "recent edits" (default: 1 August of the previous year till 31 January of the current year)
- voter-check-tool: link to a tool that shows whether a user is eligible to vote, e.g. "Pathoschild's tool" at //meta.toolforge.org/accounteligibility/40
- candidate-check-tool: link to a tool that shows whether a user is eligible to candidate
- application-start: default 15 January 00:00 UTC current year.
- application-end: default 28 January 23:59 UTC current year.
- startdate: the day that the election starts